Everything Is Connected

Theory 1: Everything is connected because everything is one. You are not a strand in the web. You are the entire web. You are doing something no mere strand ever does - you are escaping your strandness," transcending it, and becoming one with the entire display. —Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

In the section Wellness and Thinking, it was observed that we live in a predominantly left brain-oriented culture, one that values the logical, linear, mathematical approach to life, accepting C as the result of adding A and B. Unless the causal connection can be established between things, we all too often dismiss them as coincidental and hence meaningless.

Carl Jung, MD, the Swiss psychiatrist, popularized the term synchronicity to describe the occurrence of two events, in close proximity of time, that have no apparent causal relationship yet appear related. For instance, you are thinking about a friend you haven't seen in ages at the very moment that she calls. Or you are humming a tune to yourself as you turn on the car radio, and are amazed to hear the same tune playing back at you. Or you dial a wrong number, only to discover that the person on the other end is a long-lost acquaintance.

Jung found that such coincidences happen far more often than would be expected by random chance, and increase in frequency for those who are open to them. Regina, who has taught psychology for ten years, notes that many of her students started "seeing" these connections soon after they learned about the concept of synchronicity.

The idea of synchronicity gets strong scientific support from Bell's theorem. Proposed in 1964 and verified in 1972, it was pronounced "the most profound discovery in science" by physicist Henry Stapp in a 1975 federal report. Bell's theorem (anticipated by Einstein in 1935, who was too uncomfortable with it to accept it, causing him to state "God does not play dice with the universe"), proposes that everything in the universe is connected as an indivisible whole. In experiments based on Bell's theorem, it was demonstrated that if paired and identically charged particles "fly apart," and the polarity of one is changed by an experimenter, the other changes instantaneously. They remain mysteriously connected.* What this implies is that, as Gary Zukav, author of The Dancing Wu Lei Masters, puts it, "There is no such thing as separate parts. All of the parts of the universe are connected in an intimate and immediate way previously claimed only by mystics and other scientifically objectionable people."